Photos have always been powerful marketing for hotels – but how can you ensure that only great photos get seen by people? The simple answer is you can’t! In the ‘good old days’ you chose what photos went into your brochure and promotional materials and journalists even requested photos from you to use in articles. However, with the explosion of social media anyone can publish photos and videos and anyone can access them. But there are some steps you can take to increase the chances of one of your photos being used.

Great quote from Emma Roffey of Cisco at the TFMA show, “Just because it’s social doesn’t mean it’s casual” – talking about social media.

A very strong message to come out of the National Hotel Marketing Conference in February 2011 was the need to monitor and manage what is being said about you and your business on-line.
A hotel can not control what is said about it on-line, but if this is picked up immediately and then acted upon, a positive comment can become an amazing global word-of-mouth endorsement and a negative one can be dealt with by various means to prevent it damaging the business. The sooner hotels embrace the digital world in which we live and the impact of global word of mouth, the quicker they can ensure that in 10 years time potential guests are not reading a horror story about your hotel from 2011.

The TFM&A show takes place at Earls Court 1-2 March. I have attended for the past couple of years and the free seminars are a brilliant way of keeping up-to-date with the latest advances in marketing, with great presenters and up-to-date stats on what’s happening.
Visit www.t-f-m.co.uk for more info.

Etap have launched a social media campaign to find Britian’s best musical snorer, creating a micro-site where people can upload clips of snorers! Wow, who came up with this? I know hotels need to embrace social media, but this smacks of PR for the sake of PR to me!

You learn something new every day. It took us Brits years to work out what a hash key is #. Now it’s being used in front of the word ‘fail’ on social media sites to register criticism of a brand or product. Evidently it started on Twitter as disgruntled Apple users took to sharing their [...]